Monday, November 19, 2018

Several secular
liberal intellectuals in India are conflicted over the Supreme Court verdict on
Sabarimala. Their main argument is that a secular state and judiciary must
refrain from intervening in religious matters. First of all, India is
not secular in the Western sense. Secularism in India means equality of and
respect for all religions, as conceived by our Constitution. That is why in
India, you can’t jest about religion, let alone, draw cartoons and paintings
without risking serious consequences.

You try satirizing religion and you will
end up getting arrested like my “Hindu Right wing” friend was for cracking a
joke on a Hindu temple, last week. Now in this scenario,
religion remains deeply embedded in the state and the state remains attached to
religion in both peace times and conflict too. The very nature of politics,
hence, revolves around religious identity. This is no secularism; it is no
separation of religion and state, of the European Enlightenment kind.

Therefore, this
absolutist position that the Supreme Court should have stayed away from
intervening in religious practices of the Sabarimala temple, is wrong. Because,
the noninterventionist position assumes that India is a secular state in the
normative framework, where the state and religion leave each other alone to do
whatever they want. Religion, for example, in the US, does not get the right to
feel offended and the right to prosecute offenders for hurting religious
sentiments. There is no such parity in India. As of now, there is slim
possibility of getting rid of blasphemy laws and replacing it with a law on the
lines of the First Amendment in India.

Be that as it may,
what’s troubling here is that the liberals are taking a regressive line that
the state and the judiciary should turn a blind eye to the customs, traditions
and rituals which violate fundamental rights like the right to equality and the
right to constitutional remedies. This non-

interventionist argument not only
encourages the superficial secularism of India but also keeps India stuck in
perpetual misogyny and other kinds of bigotry.

If it were left to the
absolutists and noninterventionists, Dalits would have been still persecuted by
not just upper castes but by a retrograde jurisprudence too. The Indian state
cannot and should not let the tyranny of the male-dominated clergy and priests
prevail in the name of religion. It would be travesty of justice if the Supreme
Court of India had chosen to stay silent on the patriarchal notion that
menstrual women are impure, and from a religious point of view, not eligible to
pray to a god or deity. Such parochial beliefs sustain the culture of gender
discrimination and disrespect for women even if it is forbidden by law.

Most
importantly, the Indian Constitution and law cannot treat menstruating women
“impure” and lesser humans as considered by certain religious codes and
cultural practices. Any religious or
cultural practice that violates an individual’s fundamental rights, needs state
and judicial intervention. Religion cannot and should not have unlimited
autonomy and that too, at the expense of other fundamental rights. The Indian state and
the judiciary must intervene in religious matters even if it is just one
petitioner seeking justice on the grounds that a religious or cultural practice
violates his/her fundamental rights. Nothing is more sacrosanct than an
individual, as a unit of justice.

This was because of
the misperception that ‘black means cash’. If cash was squeezed out, the black
economy would disappear at one stroke – justice being meted out to the corrupt.
The Prime Minister said that for long-term gain one had to bear short-term
pain. He likened it to ‘ahuti’ in a ‘yagya’. If the pain does not
end in 50 days, Modi said, the public could give him any punishment and he
would accept it. Two years later, the
pain persists but the government only continues to justify its error. It has
refused to admit to the long-term damage to the economy, especially to
marginalised Indians in the unorganised sectors. Instead, data from the
organised sector is used to claim that the economy has recovered to a 7-8% rate
of growth. This is treated as evidence that the pain was temporary.

The government did not
survey the unorganised sectors to find out what was happening there. The
underlying assumption is that the shock to the economy did not require a change
in the old methodology for calculating growth. In that methodology, the
organised sector is more or less the proxy for the unorganised sector. But the
shock to the economy changed the ratio between the organised and the
unorganised sectors. So, the ratio used prior to November 7, 2016, was no more
valid after November 8, 2016. Data from private surveys showed that the unorganised sector was hit
hard. Surveys were conducted by Punjab Haryana Delhi Chamber of Commerce
and Industry (PHDCCI), All India Manufacturers Organization (AIMO), State Bank
of India (SBI) and many others including NGOs. The RBI survey released in March
2017 showed a sharp decline in deremand for consumer
durables and so on.

Agriculture faced a
crisis due to notes shortage. Produce could not be sold, the sowing of crops
was delayed and the demand for the perishables like vegetables collapsed.
Prices fell sharply, thereby impacting incomes of farmers. Banking also went
into a crisis since normal banking operations stopped for months. With industry,
trade and agriculture facing a crisis, the problem of NPAs only increased. According to the
Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy (CMIE), investment fell sharply during
that quarter. In effect, output, employment and investment declined, sending the
economy into a tailspin from which it has not yet recovered. The impact of the
goods and services tax (GST) from June-July 2017 again impacted the unorganised sectors and deepened
the crisis. So, now the twin impact of demonetisation and GST is being felt in
the economy. .. read more:

Saturday, November 17, 2018

You don't arrest Voltaire: President Charles de Gaulle in May 1968, ordering Sartre to be released after he was arrested for civil disobedience

Nearly forty years
after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best
remembered as the father of existentialism. We are most familiar with him as
the theorist of freedom, authenticity, and bad faith in philosophical treatises
such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and literary works such
as Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944). But
eclipsed in this popular image is an appreciation of the staggering range of
his dozens of volumes of published work, especially the fruit of his political
activity from the end of World War II until his death - a period marked most
notably by a rich and sustained engagement with Marxism.

Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir with Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960

(wikipeda commons)

Far from being
consigned to the ash heap of history, the mid-century encounter between Marxism
and existentialism remains vital today. As we seek political and philosophical
bearings in this time of renewed calls for a socialist alternative to
capitalism, postwar efforts to bring Marxism and existentialism together have
much to teach us - not only because of the continuing importance of each mode of
thought to political thinking and organizing, but also because their interaction
in Sartre’s work deepens our understanding of how we exercise agency under
conditions we do not control.

Existentialism’s
Marxist Turn: The brilliant
young Sartre began publishing in 1936 at age thirty-one. Over the next decade
he would produce a stream of groundbreaking psychological, philosophical, and
literary works and develop strong working relationships with other formidable
young Parisian intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir (who would become his
lifelong partner) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Initially he showed little
theoretical interest in either activism or Marxism. Instead he was passionately
attracted to U.S. films and fiction, and he took his theoretical bearings from
the German phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

Aging, it turns out,
is nothing but a cosmic mistake. Why? Because if you feel you are younger than
your chronological age, then you actually are. And there’s a flood of new
science to prove it.

One study from the
University of Virginia states that at least 70 percent of more than 30,000
subjects reported to feel significantly younger than their chronological age - a
divergence so drastic that the scientists invoked
the red planet: “Past age 25 or so, subjective aging appears to occur on
Mars, where one Earth decade equals only 5.3 Martian years.”

The discrepancy
becomes more pronounced the older we get. We look at our chronological age and
know with absolute certainty that we’re not there yet. This cosmic wrongness
causes ennui every time a birthday comes around. Friends offer platitudes -“Age
is just a number”- that turn out to be the truth. We do suffer from a mass
delusion. And it happens to be beneficial for us.

After analyzing the
mental and physical health of test subjects who feel younger than their
chronological age, scientists are in agreement that our chronological age is
irrelevant and our subjective age is what matters. Our subjective age is not
how old we wish to be, but how old we feel. It is a multidimensional construct
marked by one or more of the following indicators: felt age; biological age
(looks and physical health); societal age (how we act and what we do); and
intellectual age (interests and pursuits). Consider yourself lucky if you feel
young, look young, participate in youthful activities and have the curiosity of
a child - because those are the indicators for how old you really are.

Feeling younger has
many benefits. According to an article in
the Journal of Personality by researchers from Florida State
University and Montpelier University, it makes us into better people because it
fosters “openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness.” It makes us healthier
because it corresponds directly to fewer chronic conditions such as
hypertension, diabetes, and depression. It makes us stronger and yields greater
benefits from fitness regimens. The next time you think Cher might be just
another lifted-to-the-limit, wrinkle-free septuagenarian freak, keep in mind
that she claims to have a rigorous fitness routine and is able
to hold a plank for five minutes.

Arguably the greatest
benefit of a younger subjective age is how it affects the aging of the brain.
When MRI scans were used to predict chronological age, it turned out that brain aging is
much more closely related to the subjective age than the chronological age, and
it’s an important marker for mental and cognitive health… read more:

The process of
updating Assam's
National Register of Citizens (NRC)
has been a difficult and distressing test for the state's population. Over 40
lakh people were left out of the draft published in July, leading to chaos and
confusion as those not included try to find documents that will prove that they
are legal residents of the country. When the Supreme
Court said in
December 2014 that the NRC should be prepared in a time-bound manner, its order
underlined the magnitude of Bangladeshi infiltration by quoting a vital piece
of statistics:

On 14th July, 2004, in
response to an unstarred question pertaining to deportation of illegal
Bangladeshi migrants, the Minister of State, Home Affairs, submitted a
statement to Parliament indicating therein that the estimated number of illegal
Bangladeshi immigrants into India as on 31st December, 2001 was 1.20 crores,
out of which 50 lakhs were in Assam.

However, a deeper dive
into the numbers shows that the Supreme Court may have relied on hearsay to
issue the order initiating the NRC updation process. A reply given by the
Ministry of Home Affairs to an RTI application submitted by one of the authors
shows that the government does not even know how many illegal immigrants are
residing in the country.

Where did the '50
lakh' figure come from? : This is the only
estimate of the number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Assam that the SC
judgement contained. The rest of the judgement had references to documents
where Bangladeshi infiltration is mentioned, but no estimate was provided.

Magnitude matters.
"50 lakh" is a very large number for Assam, whose population was less
than 2.70 crore in 2001. If nearly one-fifth of the state's population
comprises illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, tough measures would appear
reasonable and justified... read more:

Every day before work, Kevin Lau stopped for breakfast at a restaurant in Sai Wan Ho, a residential area in eastern Hong Kong. It was a routine as ingrained in him as brushing his teeth, and it nearly cost him his life. On a morning in February 2014, Lau -- a senior editor at the popular, upmarket daily Ming Pao -- had parked his car on a street near the restaurant when two men, wearing motorcycle helmets and gloves, rushed up to him. One slashed at Lau with a meat cleaver, knocking him to the floor, where he lay bleeding with deep wounds in his back and legs as his assailants ran off.

With what a court later described as "superhuman calm," Lau phoned for an ambulance, and was rushed to hospital. He survived, and two men with triad links -- Yip Kim-wah and Wong Chi-wah -- were arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm. While Yip and Wong were later jailed, they did not reveal who had commissioned and paid for the attack, one of several against journalists in Hong Kong at that time, including the firebombing of the home and office of Jimmy Lai, publisher of the Apple Daily, a tabloid highly critical of the Chinese government.

In the wake of the attack against Lau, several thousand journalists and supporters took to the streets, dressed in black and carrying banners which read "They Can't Kill Us All" in a defiant show of support for press freedom in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. It was a tense period for journalists in Hong Kong. The sense of despair was lifted, temporarily, by the so-called Umbrella Revolution mass pro-democracy protests that broke out in late 2014. Those demonstrations saw the international media spotlight swing onto Hong Kong, and the local press rose to the challenge, covering every aspect of the protests and their fallout, and winning multiple awards in the process.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Kirill Serebrennikov
entered court this week in a black T-shirt bearing a message for Russia, a quote from
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls: “Rus’, what do you want from me?” It was an apt question
from Russia’s leading avant-garde director, who faces a tortuous, months-long
criminal trial seen as a bellwether for artistic freedom in the country. Serebrennikov has been
charged with embezzlement and faces 10 years in prison. Supporters have
compared his trial to the purge of directors during the Soviet Union and the
censorship of leading writers under the Tsars.

“People of culture
have always held the most dangerous position in Russia,” Liya Akhedzhakova, a
celebrated actor who starred in Soviet classics like Office Romance, told the
Guardianin court on Tuesday. “They are the first to be targeted.” Prosecutors claim that
Serebrennikov and three co-defendants embezzled $1.2m (£937,000) from the
Studio Seven theatre company from 2011-2014. The defence claims the money was
spent on productions.

Critics think
Serebrennikov’s problems have more to do with his politics than with money. The
virtuoso director has made his name directing plays and films that challenged
social norms, in a career that has been championed by some Kremlin officials
but has also earned him powerful enemies. The Student, a 2016
production about a teenager who wields religion to subdue his classmates and
teachers, was seen as a searing critique of the Orthodox Church. Nureyev, a 2017
ballet directed by Serebrennikov, saw its debut at the Bolshoi theatre delayed
amid concerns over its overt portrayal of the dancer’s homosexuality.

whatever the outcome of Mueller’s investigation, America is establishing new precedents. One precedent is that President Trump fired the FBI director - and Congress did nothing. Another is that Trump admitted the FBI’s investigation of his campaign motivated the firing - and Congress did nothing. A third precedent is that Trump fired the AG after having railed against him publicly for refusing to intervene in the investigation - and Congress has done nothing. A fourth precedent is that Trump circumvented the Justice Department’s order of succession so he could replace the AG with an individual who has directed partisan attacks at the special counsel.. has had a personal and political relationship with an individual involved in the investigation, and has been associated with a company that is the focus of a separate FBI investigation. We’ll see what a new Congress does about that If members of Congress or the American people fail to act, these precedents will become the guideposts for future presidents who follow the path President Trump is blazing. A new tenet of American democracy will become that a president is permitted to evade investigation by firing the heads of agencies that investigate the president’s close associates, even when the investigation is the reason for the firings. This cannot stand. Putting a president above the rule of law is a threat to democracy

With the firing of
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, America is in uncharted territory. The last
time a president made a personnel change to undermine an investigation of his
associates, Congress forced him to resign. That was when President Richard
Nixon pushed out his attorney general and deputy attorney general so he could
fire the special prosecutor. The fallout from this Saturday Night Massacre, as
it is known, has stood as a warning to subsequent presidents. Yet President
Trump has launched a piecemeal Saturday Night Massacre of his own. He first
fired FBI Director James Comey last year for his handling of the Russia probe,
then he fired the attorney general for failing to protect him from the Russia
probe. His intent to undermine an investigation of his campaign has been clear
throughout—he barely tried to hide it—but the difference this time is that he
has acted with impunity. What comes next could be anything.

The thing about
traveling in uncharted territory is that you don’t know where you’ll end up.
This may seem like a simplistic observation, but it’s one worth making.
Uncharted territory is the last place a conscientious government official wants
to be and the first place an unscrupulous one wants to go. Precedents and norms
are guideposts along well-traveled paths in government that lead to impartial
decision-making. Conscientious officials find these guideposts helpful as they
continuously check their motives to make sure they are putting the public’s
interests ahead of their own and other private interests. If circumstances
deliver them into uncharted territory, it becomes harder to gauge whether they
are serving the public’s interest.

Forty-five years ago,
the leaders of the Department of Justice found themselves in similar uncharted
terrain. An unscrupulous president was attempting to abuse his authority to
undermine a special counsel investigation of individuals associated with his
campaign for reelection. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox had demanded
President Richard Nixon’s tapes of White House deliberations. Nixon responded
by negotiating a compromise with Attorney General Elliot Richardson that would
have allowed him to withhold the tapes, summarize the contents of some of them,
and let a third party verify his summary. But Cox rejected the compromise, so
Nixon ordered Richardson to fire him... read more:

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Kuwaiti authorities
have blacklisted nearly 1,000 books at a literature festival, including one
by Fyodor
Dostoevsky. Saad al-Anzi, who
heads the Kuwait international
literary festival, said the information ministry had banned 948 books including
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a novel set in 19th-century Russia that
explores morality, free will and the existence of God.

Dostoevsky joins a
growing list of writers banned in the relatively moderate Gulf state, where
there is a growing conservative trend in politics and society. The information
ministry has blacklisted more than 4,000 books over the past five years,
including Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

All titles on show at
the 43rd edition of Kuwait’s book fair, which runs until 24 November, were
screened in advance by a censorship committee as per Kuwaiti regulations.The committee works
under a 2006 law on press and publications, which outlines a string of
punishable offences for publishers of both literature and journalism. Offences
include insulting Islam or Kuwait’s judiciary, threatening national security,
“inciting unrest” and committing “immoral” acts.

Activists took to the
streets of the capital twice in September to protest against rising censorship.

During the 1970s and
1980s Kuwait was a regional publishing hub, home to the high-brow, pan-Arab
cultural journal al-Arabi and a string of popular scientific and literary
books. But in recent years
religious conservatives and tribal leaders have gained ground in parliament.
Kuwait is the only Gulf state with elected lawmakers.

Soros has been openly critical of Facebook and Google. “The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions,” he said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. “That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them

Robinson, whose organization has run online campaigns criticizing Facebook over racial discrimination in housing ads, privacy and surveillance, racist hate speech, and other issues, said he was deeply troubled by the report. “This narrative has really dangerous antisemitic undertones about Jewish people controlling the world,” Robinson told the Guardian by phone. “

Facebook hired a PR
firm that attempted to discredit the company’s critics by claiming they were
agents of billionaire George Soros, the New
York Times reported Tuesday. Soros is a Jewish
philanthropist who is the frequent subject
of antisemitic conspiracy theories. At the same time, the social media
company urged the Anti-Defamation League to object to a cartoon used by
anti-Facebook protesters over its resemblance to antisemitic tropes. News of Facebook’s
aggressive attempts to undermine critics came in a damningreport by
the Times, detailing how Facebook executives have struggled to manage the
numerous and severe challenges confronting the company, all while lashing out
at critics and perceived enemies.

Rashad Robinson, the
executive director of one of the groups targeted by the PR campaign, Color of
Change, called the antisemitic smear “outrageous and concerning”. Amid growing pressure
from lawmakers over its role in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Facebook

increasingly
turned to Definers Public Affairs, a Washington DC based political consultancy
founded by Republican operatives and specializing in opposition research,
according to the report.

One of Definers’
tactics was to publish dozens of negative articles about other tech companies,
including Google and Apple, in order to try to distract attention from
Facebook’s public relations woes. Definers published the content on
NTKNetwork.com, a website that looks like a news site but is actually run by
the PR firm. The narratives pushed on NTK Network were often picked up by
conservative sites such as Breitbart. Another tactic was to
cast Soros as the driving force behind groups critical of Facebook... read more:

When a scholar is prevented from speaking, that is intolerance. But to prevent a great musician from performing in the national capital is not mere intolerance — it is barbarism.

NB: Guha's argument is sought to be refuted in an op-ed piece today, that refers to T.M. Krishna as a 'vicious political activist'. In his twitter page, Guha says: "You claim no one mentioned you were part of the programme; I did, clearly, in my piece in the Express. You claim the AAI 'specified' reasons; it did not. It gave no reasons whatsoever. Krishna was giving a musical concert, not giving a political talk. It was his concert that was cancelled. By bringing in his politics and his dislike of Modi, you indirectly gave the game away. When commercial film stars become apologists for the Government (any government) it is pathetic. When great classical dancers do so, it is tragic." Here are some examples of vicious behaviour by the 'Sangh's front organisations:

An Indian institution
I greatly admire is Spic Macay. Set up by Dr Kiran Seth, it has done remarkable
work in taking the extraordinary riches of our music and dance traditions to
young Indians. I first attended Spic Macay concerts in the 1970s, as a college
student in Delhi; I continue to attend them in the second decade of the 21st
century, as a 60-year-old in Bangalore. Under their generous auspices I have
heard Padma Talwalkar sing and seen Leela Samson dance, gloried in the sarod of
Amjad Ali Khan and in the flute of Hariprasad Chaurasia.

Another Indian institution
I admire is T M Krishna. Krishna is a force of nature. He is, best known, of
course, for his music. However, apart from being a singer of genius, he is a
public-spirited individual with an abiding commitment to the greater good,
whether it is the restoration of the forests of the Western Ghats or the
restoration of social harmony in strife-torn Jaffna. I have heard T M
Krishna sing many times. The concert of his that will stay with me until I die
was performed in a village named Belavadi, in the district of Chikmagalur.
Belavadi has a Hoysala-era temple, built on the human scale, and with exquisite
sculpture. A friend of Krishna’s has a farm nearby; and he had the inspired
idea of asking him to sing at this 1,000-year-old temple.

My wife and I drove
down from Bangalore for the occasion. The music was sublime; the setting
gorgeous. Behind where Krishna sat was the deity. After several minutes in deep
contemplation, his eyes shut, he sang for us the music of the divine. Krishna
is thoroughly trained in the classical tradition; and this evening he brought
us the full range of the Carnatic oeuvre. We city folks listened, transfixed;
as did the villagers of Belavadi, young and old, men and women, who had come to
this public space for this special, and especially joyous, occasion.

The U.S. entry into
World War I abruptly ended a different campaign to end war. Between the onset
of hostilities in Europe in July 1914 and the U.S. declaration of war in April
1917, a determined group of women activists lobbied the president and Congress
to maintain American neutrality and
mediate a “negotiated
peace.”

Although these women’s
efforts proved futile, their persistence and passion still resonate today. By
insisting that all citizens – even women, who did not yet have the right to
vote – could and should participate in the highest levels of politics, they
helped create a civic culture of engaged citizenship that continues to inform
American politics today. The idea of
arbitrating World War I may seem naive in hindsight. Yet for nearly three
years, numerous pacifist groups and individuals in both the United States and
Europe advanced proposals for neutral mediation.

Proponents of
international mediation hoped diplomatic intervention could bring the war to a
swift end and prevent additional loss of life. They also hoped to pave the way
for a new type of diplomacy, based on international law and voluntary
arbitration, that would ensure lasting peace. Men and women on both
sides of the Atlantic participated in the campaign for neutral arbitration.
Most memorably, American automobile magnate

NB: The Saudi Arabian state is a criminal enterprise buttressed by the Western powers and oil money. They have poisoned world politics for decades with a stinking mixture of religious fanaticism and hard cash. We will all continue to pay the price until it disappears. DS

It A message captured in
the audio record of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi is widely believed to be an
instruction to notify the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that the
operation to slay the Washington Post journalist had
been carried out successfully. In the recording, which
Turkey has said was passed on to western allies, the comment “tell your boss”
that the operatives had carried out their mission, is believed to be the
strongest evidence connecting the Crown Prince, also known as MBS, to the
murder of Khashoggi.

While the prince was
not mentioned by name, American intelligence officials believe, reported by
the New
York Times, that “your boss” was a reference to Prince Mohammed.
Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, one of 15 Saudis dispatched to Istanbul to confront Khashoggi
at the Saudi Consulate there, is reported to have made the phone call and spoke
in Arabic to relay the message to “the boss” that the operation to kill Jamal
was successful. A former CIA officer
also told the newspaper the comment strongly incriminates MBS. “A phone call
like that is about as close to a smoking gun as you are going to get,” Bruce
Riedel, who now works at the Brookings Institution, told the Times.
“It is pretty incriminating evidence,” he added. People familiar with
the content of the recording revealed that Mutreb, who is a diplomat and
is known
to be very close to MBS, spoke to one of the aides of MBS. While
translations of the Arabic may differ, people briefed on the call are reported
to have said that Mutreb informed the aide that the “the deed was done”.

Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed on Saturday the existence of an audio
recording of Khashoggi’s death and said he had shared it with the
United States, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France and the UK. “We gave the
recordings, we gave them to Saudi Arabia, we gave them to Washington, to the
Germans, to the French, to the English,” Erdogan said in a televised speech.
“They listened to the conversations which took place here. They know,” he said.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Amnesty International has announced it is stripping Aung San Suu Kyi of a prestigious human rights award over her “shameful betrayal of the values she once stood for”. The Ambassador of Conscience Award is the latest in a series of accolades to be withdrawn from Myanmar’s de facto leader, who has been criticised for failing to intervene to stop a campaign of violence against the country’s Rohingya Muslims. Amnesty said it was withdrawing the award “with great sadness” because of Ms Suu Kyi’s “apparent indifference to atrocities committed by the Myanmar military and increasing intolerance of freedom of expression”.

While living under house arrest in 2009, Ms Suu Kyi was named as Amnesty’s Ambassador of Conscience ”in recognition of her peaceful and non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”. But now, half way through her term in office and eight years after being released from custody, Amnesty said it was disappointed she had not safeguarded human rights, justice or equality in Myanmar. The secretary general of the human rights group Kumi Naidoo said in a letter to Ms Suu Kyi: “Our expectation was that you would continue to use your moral authority to speak out against injustice wherever you saw it, not least within Myanmar itself.

“Today, we are profoundly dismayed that you no longer represent a symbol of hope, courage, and the undying defence of human rights.” He continued: “Amnesty International cannot justify your continued status as a recipient of the Ambassador of Conscience award and so with great sadness we are hereby withdrawing it from you.” Amnesty has been a vocal critic of Ms Suu Kyi, and has previously accused her of failing to speak out about military atrocities committed against the Rohingya population in the country’s Rakhine state. The Rohingya have been persecuted in the former British colony for decades, with the government denying them citizenship and excluding them from the 2014 census... read more:

NB: This incident took place within (approximately) a kilometre of the official residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For me, it symbolises the chief marker of the BJP/RSS government: police apathy (or worse) in the face of lawlessness, and assumption of impunity by violent men indulging in lynching or attempts at lynching. Readers may also read the text in the source link below. DS

Chills run down my spine as I write this, forced to relive the moments which have changed my life. As a woman who has grown up in this city over the last three decades, I always considered Delhi to be my home. Today, I no longer feel safe in Delhi, a city whose people I foolishly thought I understood despite its worsening reputation. However, this story needs to be told. So here goes:

My husband, his friend who was visiting us, and I were in Khan Market. We were showing our friend around and decided to stop for a bite to eat. As we were looking for parking, my husband spotted a slot, and got out of the car to manage traffic behind me, while I reversed into the parking spot with the parking attendant’s help. While he requested the cars behind to wait for a minute, the impatient driver of the car he was standing in front of got enraged at being made to wait, accelerated and nudged his car into my husband’s legs. Losing his balance, my husband fell onto the road.

Following this, there was a heated exchange between my husband and the driver resulting in the driver calling out to some people standing around, some mechanics and a few other men arriving on the spot. Seeing the unsavoury crowd build up, I was concerned about our safety and asked my husband to get into the car to leave asap. As he got into the car, we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by at least 10-15 people, who were getting pretty aggressive.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

The first full
interrogation of German scientist Felix Houtermans by the NKVD took place in
January 1938 in Kharkov, to which he had been transported after his arrest in
Moscow a month before. It lasted eleven straight days, a procedure known to the
secret police as a “Conveyor.” During those eleven days Houtermans was given
only two breaks, of five hours on the first day and two hours on the second.
The rest of the time he was kept awake. After the fourth day, he was also kept
on his feet. By the end, he was falling into unconsciousness every twenty to
thirty minutes, and his feet were so swollen that his shoes had to be cut off
afterward. The interrogators told him they were going to arrest his wife, that
his children were going to be sent to an orphanage under new names, so he would
never see them again. As he would later tell his cellmate, this last threat is
what finally broke him.

The interrogators only
had two questions: “Who induced you to join the counterrevolutionary
organization?” and “Whom did you induce yourself?” Fritz told them everything
they wanted to hear about what he had been doing since arriving in the Soviet
Union with his family three years before. He said that he was a spy and had
been sent to the Soviet Union by the Gestapo. That he had designed a machine
that could measure the speed of airplanes with lines of magnetic force. That
the focus of his espionage was nuclear physics. That he knew how to bring about
a chain reaction—even though this was 1938, when no such thing had been done
before, and no one would actually accomplish it for another four years.

Sixty-Three
Years: Born in Poland in
1903, raised in Vienna, and educated in Germany, Houtermans was deported from
the Soviet Union as a German spy two years after his interrogation, in 1940.
But once back in Germany, he was arrested again—this time as a Soviet spy. At
the time of his death in 1966 he was living in neither country: he had left for
Bern, Switzerland, where he ran a physics institute. During his sixty-three
years, Houtermans work had reconnoitered the extremes of time, examined the lifespan
of the world. He had once helped to give the Earth its birth date. Had he acted
differently at one crucial juncture, he might have helped destroy it.

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of ResentmentReviewed by Wesley Yang

If “The End of History?” was “Marxist” in
its framework, Fukuyama said, his neocon friends had become “Leninist” in
believing the U. S. had the power to hasten the movement of history through
military force. He believes they drew the wrong lessons from the Reagan years,
specifically the belief that undemocratic societies would simply default toward
democracy if we toppled their dictators...

Fukuyama’s grandfather
was an immigrant from Japan. He came to the United States in 1905, when it was
still a nation with mostly open borders, to evade the draft for the
Russo-Japanese war. He built a successful hardware store in downtown Los
Angeles and became a community leader in Little Tokyo. After the attack on
Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to an internment camp by the U. S.
government for the duration of World War II. Given two weeks to sell off his
business, he did so to a white competitor for virtually nothing. “He basically
lost his lifetime’s work,” Fukuyama said. After his release, Fukuyama’s
grandfather was never able to establish himself in business again. When he
finally became a naturalized citizen, he cast his first vote in the U. S.
presidential election of 1964. The vote he cast was for Barry Goldwater….

….Back in 1992,
Fukuyama was blithe about the “smallness of actually existing inequalities.” By
the early 2010s, he had begun to sound the alarm about the rise of wealthy and
powerful elites rigging the political system in their favor. This capture had
led to “political decay,” in which special-interest groups were able to block
the popular will, including on hot-button issues such as immigration, where
polling indicated that a broad consensus existed. He began to call for a
renewed left-wing movement to contest the growing consolidation of power.

Fukuyama is hardly a
trusted figure among Democrats, though he has, in recent years, taken to
railing against what conservatism has become. He is exasperated with the large
faction of the electorate willing to be persuaded by the crude and dishonest
appeals of a man he took to be “a total idiot completely unqualified to be
president.” But while deploring the remedy to which these voters resorted, he
acknowledges the grievances that fueled their resentments. “Both the financial
crises in the U. S. and the Eurozone and the migrant crises in Europe were
regarded as elite-leadership failures, and rightly so in both cases. They did
screw up.”

Yet traditional parties of the Left have
been hemorrhaging support throughout Europe despite a three-decade rise in
economic inequality in countries all around the globe. Fukuyama noted that the
left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement “marched and demonstrated, then fizzled
out,” while the Tea Party “succeeded in taking over both the Republican Party
and much of Congress.” Instead of articulating an overarching vision of
economic justice, many on the Left seem intent on elaborating ever more
fractionated identity categories demanding recognition—a move that is
intrinsically at cross-purposes to one that seeks change through mass democratic
means. “The Democrats have become the party of minorities, white professionals,
and educated white women,” Fukuyama said, “while the Republicans are the white
people’s party. It’s a moral disaster for American democracy.”..

The novelist and screenwriter has built an enormous following, especially among women, by portraying women at their worst.

... If Flynn is
particularly popular among women, it’s because she doesn’t make a big deal out
of writing about women, because being a woman doesn’t really feel like a big
deal, even when, unavoidably, it is one. Doing press for the film, Flynn was
discouraged by how frequently she was asked beside-the-point questions, like,
“What do you want women to take away from this movie?”

Audiences want some kind
of lesson, conventional wisdom says, something easily digestible and
repeatable, for all the usual reasons: social media, laziness, discomfort with
ambiguity. People like to be able to say what it is they’re doing. Flynn’s
popularity suggests otherwise. “This isn’t a movie that’s made for women,” she
told me. “It’s not a women’s-issue movie. It’s unnerving, the idea that if
there is a movie that has more than two women onscreen together, it’s a message
movie.” Which isn’t to say
that it contains no messages, only that it resists being defined by them…

The mainstreaming of
feminism (and online surveillance thereof) has made many women I know — and
myself — anxious about conforming to stereotypes, lest we perpetuate the same
conditions we find so constraining. At the same time, self-consciously
rejecting even harmless or positive ingrained ideas about women for the sake of
doing so feels ridiculous, maybe even regressive. If there’s any way to escape
this double bind and establish some agency, it may be to approach womanhood
like Flynn does, as just another perversity among many. Ultimately, women’s
issues are particular in the same way anyone’s are: How do we keep going, given
the circumstances?.. read more..

A striking yellow, black and white bird spotted in Pennsylvania is actually a
hybrid between three different species, according to a news release from the Cornell Lab of
Ornithology. Extremely observant
bird watcher Lowell Burket saw the male bird in the borough of Roaring Spring
in May. He noticed that the bird had the physical attributes of the blue-winged
warbler and golden-winged warbler, but sang like a third species, the
chestnut-sided warbler.

LOWELL BURKET

The bird piqued his interest enough that after taking
photos and video, he contacted the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Lab at Cornell. “I tried to make the
email sound somewhat intellectual so they wouldn’t think I was a crackpot,” he
said in the release. Luckily, the lab did
not think Burket was a crackpot, and researcher David Toews soon got in touch
with him. Together, they found the bird again and took a blood sample and
measurements for ID purposes.

As it turned out,
Burket’s suspicion was right. DNA analysis showed that the bird’s mother was a
hybrid between golden-winged warbler and a blue-winged warbler, while the
father was a chestnut-sided warbler. The results of the analysis were published this week in the science journal Biology Letters. The paper notes that
the mix is especially significant because the bird’s mother and father weren’t
just different species, but also different genera. Golden- and blue-winged
warblers are both part of the Vermivora genus, while chestnut-sided warblers are
part of the Setophaga genus.

Researchers suspect
this three-way hybridization ultimately happened in part because of declining
numbers in the local population of golden-winged warblers, leaving females with
fewer potential mates. In response, they may be “making the best of a bad
situation” by selecting mates outside of their own species and genus,
researchers wrote. As for the rare new
hybrid, he’s hopefully enjoying some warmer weather at the moment. “The bird was released
with a [United States Geological Survey] aluminum band and was seen on the
property until about late August, after which it wasn’t seen again,” Toews told
HuffPost in an email. “Presumably it migrated south for the winter!”

Saturday, November 10, 2018

President Trump, who
regularly makes a point of personally insulting public figures who challenge or
displease him in any way, taps into an especially toxic well of vitriol when
aiming his attacks at black Americans. This week alone, Trump berated CNN correspondent Abby Phillip ("What
a stupid question. But I watch you a lot. You ask a lot of stupid
questions.") He said of April Ryan, a reporter and CNN contributor who
has covered the White House for 21 years: "You talk about somebody that's
a loser. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing."

And at a post-election
press conference, when Yamiche Alcindor of "PBS NewsHour" began to ask about
accusations that his rhetoric may have emboldened violent white nationalist
groups, Trump interrupted with, "I don't know why you say that. That is
such a racist question." The three women -- all
of them gifted, accomplished professionals -- will be covering politics long
after Trump has left the White House. They join a long list of athletes,
entertainers, journalists and politicians who Trump routinely attacks as
"dumb," "not qualified" or some such insult.

None of this is subtle
or secret; that would defeat the purpose. For Trump, loudly and publicly
denigrating black figures is the whole point. He
is a classic example of a backlash politician: a leader who exploits real or
perceived white anxieties by exhibiting a flamboyant hostility to the political
and economic demands of black Americans. We've had a string of such politicians
since the civil rights movement, and that is neither surprising nor
coincidental: Like many social revolutions, America's expansion of civil rights
in the 1960s and '70s gave rise to a potent counterrevolution.

We saw it in Ronald
Reagan's decision to launch
his 1980 campaign for president at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia,
Mississippi, where an infamous triple murder of civil rights
organizers had occurred in 1964. Reagan didn't mention the martyred civil
rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner or James Chaney in his speech,
which was all about state's rights. As columnist Bob Herbert
later noted: "Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was
signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all
knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial
hatred knew. And Reagan knew. He was tapping out the code.".. read more:

The Philippines says it will charge the major news site Rappler, which
has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte, with tax evasion. Prosecutors said on
Friday they also have grounds to indict founder Maria Ressa for violating tax
laws after not declaring gains made in tax returns. Rappler has denied the
charges, calling the case a "clear form of continuing intimidation and
harassment".

If found guilty Ms
Ressa could be fined and jailed for up to 10 years.

The government accuses
Rappler and its chief executive of failing to pay tax on 2015 bond sales which
resulted in 162.5 million pesos ($3 million; £2.3 million) in gains.

The English-language
outlet's lawyer told journalists the case "has no legal leg to stand
on" because Rappler did not evade any tax obligation. A justice department
official told news agency AFP the charges would be filed in court next week. Earlier this
year, the site had its licence revoked by the state,
igniting a national debate about press freedom... read more:

When public discourse
denigrates expertise, when politicians and Twitter trolls alike have learned to
dismiss every criticism or uncomfortable truth as “fake” and media outlets
compete for clickbait headlines, it’s not surprising to find a corresponding
hunger for a deeper, more thoughtful form of engagement with ideas and for that
– thankfully – there’s still no better medium than a book.

On Wednesday, the
Baillie Gifford prize will be presented, Britain’s most prestigious award for
nonfiction writing. Whichever of the six
shortlisted authors takes home the £30,000 prize and the resulting
boost to sales, it’s an opportunity for booksellers and publishers to remind
the public of the current robust health of nonfiction writing. Not so long ago,
nonfiction bestseller lists were dominated by cookbooks and celebrity memoirs,
but over the past couple of years a noticeable shift has taken place. Books about evolution
(Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens), medicine (Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt), geopolitics (Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography), physics (Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions) and philosophy (Jordan
Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life) have all held on in the top 10.

Harari’s
book in particular, with sales of more than three quarters of a million copies,
heralded a renaissance of whatthe Bookseller magazine
this year called the “brainy
backlist”. Serious nonfiction is
back in fashion, with essayists such as Rebecca Solnit and Teju Cole building devoted followings for work that addresses
political turbulence in the US, and a new generation of British writers – among
them Laurie Penny, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Nikesh Shukla – speaking to new, younger, diverse readerships
on issues of race, feminism and activism.

“Sometimes, justice
delayed amounts to injustice… it would be better if the court decides early,
for the sake of peace and harmony in the country. But I don’t see it happening
at this stage.” That was Uttar Pradesh
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on October 30, a day after the Supreme Court
deferred hearing on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title suit saying a bench
will decide a date in January. These lines could well
have been from 26 years ago when Mahant Avaidyanath, Adityanath’s mentor, the
head of the Gorakhnath Math and one of the leading lights of the Sangh
Parivar’s temple movement, had hit out at the “delay”.

And eight years ago,
when the Supreme Court asked the Allahabad High Court to delay its verdict on
the title suit — it was delivered a week later and is now in appeal before the
top court — that was also Ashok Singhal of the VHP, angry at what he thought
was “another bid to delay justice”. As Adityanath lends
weight to the Parivar chorus for an early decision on the title suit in the
run-up to 2019, reporters like me, who camped weeks in Ayodhya in the final
months of the Babri Masjid, are struck by the uncanny resemblance between the
utterances then and now.

The matter then was
before the Allahabad High Court, now before the Supreme Court. But the larger
message has been the same, the utterances a re-run of attempts to ratchet up
the pressure for an early decision on, what the High Court called, “a small
piece of land… where angels fear to tread… full of innumerable land mines”
which “we are required to clear”. In July 1992, five
months before the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaders of the VHP and Hindu
religious heads oversaw a kar seva at a spot facing the three domes on the
disputed 2.77 acres — it was where the Rajiv Gandhi government,
trying to reach out to Hindus after his government overturned the Shah Bano
ruling to surrender to Muslim orthodoxy, had allowed the shilanyas ceremony in
November 1989 for a future temple.

Saturday, November 3, 2018

On the night of 22
May, 1987, the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary rounded up 42 Muslim
men from Hashimpura in Meerut, put them in a truck, drove them to a canal in
Ghaziabad and shot them. It took seven years
for the Uttar Pradesh government to complete its investigation, and another two
years for the state to file a charge sheet against the 19 accused policemen in
a local court in Ghaziabad, where the case was stuck until 2002, when the Supreme
Court moved it to New Delhi.

It would be another 15
years before a trial court in Delhi ruled that 42 Muslim men were indeed
executed, but there was no clinching evidence against the 16 surviving
policemen accused in the case. This week, on 31 October, 2018, the Delhi High
Court, sentenced the accused men to life

imprisonment for the "targeted
killing" of the Muslim victims. While, on the one
hand, it has taken 31 years for the victims to get justice, the Hashimpura
verdict is one of the rare instances where mass violence in India might not go
unpunished.

In a conversation
with HuffPost India, Rebecca John, who has represented the families
of the victims for 15 years, spoke of the "very very difficult"
journey of the Hashimpura case, the joy after the verdict, and the hidden
evidence which made the Delhi High Court overturn the trial court's ruling.

What does justice
after 31 years mean, as the lawyer in this case?

The fact that these
men have been convicted, it means a lot to me. When you are officers of the
court, and when you are part of a system, this is what we fight for. People who
are innocent should be acquitted and people who are guilty should be convicted.
In a case as gross as this, where police officers were involved in the gruesome
murder of these men, it was a very tough journey because it was very difficult
to answer the victims as to why it was taking as long as it was taking. Why one
court chose to acquit these people although they were conscious of the fact that
the state of UP had not put up its best efforts to give evidence before the
court, and had spent the large majority of its time suppressing evidence. It's
been a very very difficult journey, but the verdict, 31 years too late, was
still a verdict we welcomed and overjoyed about.

How do you see
getting a verdict in this case, when other cases of mass violence, 1984
anti-Sikh riots, Kunan Poshpora, have not been resolved?

You can't compare two
criminal cases. The only limited thing that I can say is that criminal cases
must be investigated within a reasonable time frame. You cannot take 10-12
years to investigate a case and that's happened in all cases of mass violence.
Secondly, courts must show a sense of urgency because these are not ordinary
cases. I'm not saying one death is less important than another death, but
courts must be cognizant of cases of mass violence, and they must approach this
differently from ordinary criminal cases and at least push the prosecution
within a reasonable time frame.That is not happening. And that is why you see
the kind of delays you see in our country.

Criminal trials take
forever to complete, but in cases of communal violence, mass custodial
violence, these delays are compounded even further because it does not suit
anyone to ensure quick justice particularly when the other side, people accused
of the crime are either police officers or people whom the state wants to
protect... read more: